The one recorded at Lisduff in County Clare is typical in its anonymity, a low horseshoe-shaped mound of fire-cracked stone sitting in the landscape with little to announce its age or purpose. These sites are generally dated to the Bronze Age, roughly 1500 to 500 BC, and represent repeated episodes of heating stones in a fire and dropping them into a water-filled trough to bring the water to the boil. What was actually being cooked, or whether cooking was even the primary purpose, remains genuinely debated; proposals have ranged from meat preparation to textile fulling to communal bathing.

The site at Lisduff carries the accumulated weight of that wider mystery without, at present, much in the way of individual documentation to set it apart. The mound itself, the characteristic signature of a fulacht fia, is formed from the gradual discard of shattered stones, which crack and crumble after repeated heating and quenching and become useless for further firing. Over many visits and many seasons, this waste material accumulates into the low, rounded banks that survive today across boggy ground and river margins throughout Clare and the rest of Ireland. The Lisduff example stands as one node in that enormous, still only partially understood network of Bronze Age activity.